Carl Henrikson Narrator Professor Allen Nevins and Mr. Louis M. Starr Interviewers December 27, 1954 642 Fifth Avenue, New York City It was interesting to see how much it cost to feed a man per day up in the woods. I kept records and showed them to the cooks in the various camps. It became competitive with them to see who could feed the men at the lowest cost and yet satisfy them, because it would hurt a cook’s reputation terrible to have any complaint about his food. As I recall it, in the summertime it would cost a good deal more because they had to serve eggs and bacon and ham; they couldn’t serve fresh meat because they didn’t have any way to keep it. In the summertimeProject--this was back in 1923--we fed men at a cost of about ninety-one, ninety-two or ninety- three cents a day. In the wintertime we could feed them for about seventy-seven or seventy-eight cents a day. They ate more beans and fresh meat in wintertime. Fresh meat actually cost less than hams and bacon and eggs. We also had some fresh vegetables, but not a great many. We didSociety use colored oleomargarine in those days, believe it or not. History There was no company dietician; the cook was the dietician. But the men oftentimes got fresh meat for breakfast, at noon and at night. Of course, on the log drives, they got four meals a day. They started work at six o’clock in the morningOral and they got breakfast. There was another meal fed them on the banks about the middle of the morning, ten-thirty, another one around three and another one around seven-thirty. Of course a good many of the men were not near the Wannigan that’s the floating cook camp. They were what Historicalwe called the “beat crews”. They walked up and down the rivers to see that the logs kept flowing freely, and they carried “nose bags” with them. As a matter of fact, most of the men who were working on the wings and down the river apiece also carried nose bags. It Historywas a white canvas bag twelve inches long and about eight inches wide, with a strap that could be put around the neck. The men would go around the loaded tables filling their nose bags. They had to be very careful where they left them because a lot of squirrels and chipmunks up there certainly went after those nose bags. I remember one time when we were all wearing our nose bags--at that time we put the strap around so that the nose bag was right back of our necks and wasn’t in the way--I was with a fellow who always tried to tip me into the water when I gotForest on a log withMinnesota him, and so I thought it would be fun to tip him in, and I did. Of course his nose bag got soaking wet. I pulled him up on the log and said, “Look, I’ve got plenty in my nose bag. I can share with you.” He said, “That’s all right. I’ve got fourteen hardboiled eggs in here; it hasn’t hurt a thing.” They were great egg eaters. We happened to pass by a big chicken farm once. I was amazed to see this chicken farm on the banks of this river. We were short of eggs, and I went up and talked to the farmer and told him I would buy all his eggs. He said, “Oh, young man, you don’t know how 1 many eggs I’ve got.” “You don’t know how many eggs I need!” There were six hundred dozen eggs. I bought them all, and we took them down to the river in buckets and bushel baskets. They didn’t last very long. We had seventy-seven men on this particular crew and I think they lasted about a week or so. The cook made everything out of eggs, and they ate eggs to beat the band. Eggs are very good for the health, and take the place of meat, supplying protein. Before I got into this, I was working at the YMCA up in Duluth, Minnesota. I had plans to go to college. I wanted to get into some kind of work that would enable me to get a stake and finance my way through. I had a ticket to sail on the Great Lakes as a mate, and I had arranged to go on a ship at seven o’clock the next morning as a mate. That evening a young fellow, a tall good looking chap by the name of Jack Campbell, got in touch with me to say he wanted me to go into the woods with him as a clerk. He had just organized a new company, Projecta partnership with Mortimer Shiels--Mort Shiels was an old-timer in the woods. Jack had graduated from Yale; I think a year or two before and had a fling at speculative oil drilling. Jack’s father was woods superintendent for the Cloquet and Northern lumber companies, the Weyerhaeuser operation. Jack had gotten a contract with Mort Shiels to build twelve and one halfSociety miles of railroad from Outpost 25 on the Duluth Northeastern to the Cloquet River. The lumber company had sold the river rights to the power comp any and they had to hoistHistory the logs out of the dam flowage, haul the logs over to the Duluth Northeastern Railroad and then back to Cloquet. That’s how I happened to get into the woods. I liked Jack Campbell and he offered me what at that time was a pretty good salary--one hundred and twenty-Oralfive dollars a month and food. I could save all the money, which was extremely important. This was in 1923. I started as clerk. As a matter of fact, I was accountaHistoricalnt for the company. Jack and Mort each gave me twenty-five dollars when I went up to this railroad car which was the camp, and that was the paid-in capital of Campbell & Shiels. They had expected that it would take us about six months to build this railroad. WhenHistory I went up there, there was just Chris Lee, the foreman, and two or three other fellows in the camp cars. Chris had laid out the railroad, not with surveying instruments, but just over pointed sticks, and he did a remarkable job. The road was built in three months instead of six. The total contract had been seventy-five thousand dollars. When we closed the books we had a cash profit of forty thousand, and we had horses andForest a lot of equipment,Minnesota so we did extremely well. One of the reasons we did well was this: they had expected that we would have to haul in gravel from a gravel pit up the line on the Duluth Northeastern and that we would have to use gravel trains. A gravel train was a train of flat cars with sides that swung open. Then they would have what looked like a snow plow. They would start at one end of the cars and they would have a winch. They would pull that plow through the gravel trains, the gravel would go out on the side of the road, and they would shovel the gravel back on the tracks. 2 We tried something new. Chris and I talked this over many evenings. We had seen ore cars which could dump cinders right on the tracks themselves. So we decided that we could rent some ore cars, get the gravel right on our own line within a quarter of a mile from where we had the camp less, even and we wouldn’t have to rent the gravel train, which the comp any was going to rent us, of course. I think we rented five or seven ore cars, and we filled them with gravel. We put the gravel on the tracks by merely putting a tie against the rear truck, opening up the hopper and pulling the car along. We had the gravel right where we wanted it, and it didn’t have to be shoveled on the tracks. All we had to do was jack up the track and let it fall on top of the gravel. Then, with the big gandy dancers, the men who tamped the gravel, tamping a little bit under each side, we had the road in good shape. We had no trestles to build; it was all filled. So the job was done faster than they expected and we came out with a very good profit. Project Then the logging company decided that they would try to get some of that excessive profit back from us. They had some scattered timber near Caribou Lake. It was about two and one half miles from a little station called Bartlett, very close to Duluth, incidentally. Because it was a stand that had to be got out in one year, and we had to build five camps, they didn’tSociety think that we could make any money on the contract they gave us, which was about five dollars less than other people had bid. But we made money on the job too. WeHistory had the same gang. As a matter of fact, we had most of the crew from the railroad job to work in the camps, but we had to recruit lumberjacks from Duluth.